Put brakes on the choo-choo, Charlie
Gov stuck on costly track laid by out-of-touch train-iacs
“And after more than three decades of lip service, we’re going to make commuter rail from Fall River and New Bedford to Boston a reality.” — Gov. Charlie Baker, Jan. 23.
What is it with Massachusetts pols and their choo-choo trains?
If you missed Gov. Charlie Baker’s State of the State speech Tuesday night (“Honey — you forgot to set the DVR!”), it was the usual Massachusetts politics yadda, yadda, yadda. Somewhere around the third “yadda,” Baker threw in his pledge to build the commuter rail line to Fall River — making him the fifth Massachusetts governor in a row to push the Fall River rail plan.
A quick refresher on that plan. Baker wants to spend $3.4 billion — almost enough to pay for every rider and every ride on the entire MBTA system for an entire year — on a twophase project: First, a diesel system through Middleboro to Fall River; and then eventually a completely different electric train that goes through Stoughton.
That’s right: One train for the price of two. Such a deal!
And besides — who the heck wants a train to Fall River in the first place?
I’m not being mean to the fine folks of Fall River, aka “Massachusetts’ Most Dangerous City.” I’m just noting a 2016 report projecting a daily ridership on a Fall River line of 4,500 people. To put that in perspective, about 3,000 people in Massachusetts get picked up by Uber every hour.
And it doesn’t cost taxpayers $3.4 billion.
Why are the ridership numbers so low? Maybe because the trip will take 90 minutes each way — a three-hour, roundtrip commute. And at a likely cost of between $12 and $15 each way (not including the $5 we spend subsidizing every commuter rail trip right now).
So, $150 a week to sit on a train for three hours a day? On a trip you can make by car in under an hour, depending on traffic?
“Aha!” train-iacs cry, “but there’s always traffic! That’s why we need the choochoos!” And they’ve got a point — about the traffic, anyway. Traffic in the Boston area absolutely sucks. And if Amazon really does bring its second headquarters here — with 50,000 employees, plus families — then we all might as well plow up our driveways and sell our cars. The roads will be impassable.
So, yes, we need to do something about transportation. But the worst, the dumbest, the most expensive thing to do is fixed rail. Because “fixed” doesn’t fix anything.
As the Amazon saga reminds us, the future is uncertain. One major employer’s decision to re-locate can drastically change travel patterns. You know what can’t change with it? “Fixed” rail. And even if it could, rail is by far the most expensive mode of transportation per mile traveled,
If the problem really is crowded roads, here’s a crazy idea: How about “more roads”? Liberals hate that idea because it makes suburban commuters happy, and nothing annoys lefties more than a happy suburbanite.
If you really must have more mass transit, then add two lanes of highway from Fall River to downtown Boston, and make one of them a “Buses/Premium Toll Only” lane (aka “Lexus Lane”) during rush hour. Express buses with Wi-Fi could make the trip faster than Charlie’s commuter rail and, according to transportation analyst Baruch Feigenbaum, at about one-fifth the cost. Plus, Feigenbaum adds, tolls could cover about half the cost.
Mass transit. More roads. Money saved. What’s the problem?
It’s not a choo-choo train. And we must have our trains! Europe has trains! Japan has trains! Disneyland has trains!
Sigh.
And so we’ll spend billions on more cutting-edge technology from the 19th century, for a project that won’t be finished until the year 2024 — just in time for us to ride by its empty, abandoned tracks in our self-driving cars.